 So I'm Simon Addison. I'm a Principal Researcher at IID. I've been leading our work on loss and damage for the past year or so, but we're going to range of other climate governance and finance related issues. And the purpose of today's webinar is to try and help us understand collectively what loss and damage is, get a better understanding of how it's affecting poor communities in developing countries, and how developing country governments and the international community can respond to this mounting challenge of loss and damage now and in the years to come. So here is a range of different definitions that have been proposed by in different documents and by different organizations so very similar to the kinds of things that you have put there in the chat. And so really what we're talking about is losses that are caused by climate change which are irrevocable and complete so that might be the loss of lives, habitats and species etc. Or damages which are harms that can in theory be repaired, but which may not be if there are right kinds of response and recovery are not put in place but the green bubbled now down at the bottom is not a universally approved definition but it is what the UNFCCC has suggested as one way of framing loss and damage which is that it's the actual and or potential manifestation of impacts associated with climate change that negatively affect human and natural systems and ecosystems. So loss and damage importantly, and this is another point made by the UNFCCC, it can result from a range of different climate hazards. And what we're seeing today, we've already heard about the floods in Pakistan, the drought in Somalia and the Horn of Africa, extreme weather events are obviously on our radar, in terms of the events that cause loss and damage. We need to consider slow onset events and those are manifold from desertification loss of biodiversity and glacier melt to sea level rise, and also rising temperatures that may make places very difficult to live in. And loss and damage can cause a wide range of different types of impact different types of losses and damages, really a multiplicity of them. We're often categorized into economic losses where we might see incomes on impacts on income and physical assets, as well as non economic losses which are many more such as the loss of life impacts on health is placement in human mobility, etc. And those are laid out there at the bottom. And it's really important to notice that in many of the most vulnerable communities, many of the, the, the poorest communities that are already affected by loss and damage, or will be in the future it's non economic losses that are potentially more damaging for them. And over the past several decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of disasters that are being triggered by climate and weather related hazards, and the number of people that are affected by such hazards as well. We now know, as a result of the latest IPCC reports that there we can clearly see that this increase is related very closely to climate change it's not only related to climate change it's also related to things like increasing demographics increasing urbanization and other complex issues, but climate change is a significant driver of this increase. If we dig down a little more into the details what we can see is that flooding and storms in particular are causing a very large number of this, of hazardous events, as well as droughts and earthquakes and the increases we've seen have been particularly around floods and storms. The number of deaths by natural hazards has, on the other hand, decreased or appears to have decreased in 2021 compared to the average over the previous two decades was quite a lot lower across the board. But contrary to that we're seeing a quite dramatic increase in the economic losses I think this tells us two things one is that over the past 20 years of humanitarian action humanitarian reform, resilience building and disaster risk reduction, the global community governments and civil society become much better at saving lives in the case of climate related disasters, but we are seeing a quite significant increase in the broader impacts of those disasters, particularly in economic losses, and also in the non economic losses but those are not generally very well documented. The impacts of these kinds of climate related disasters is very unequal, as we can see globally. And it's also unequally spread across particular nations in different regions depending on their level of development so this shows here the levels of multi dimensional risk that countries experience in relation to their GDP per capita and we can see quite clearly that at least developed countries are falling very much at the bottom of that that distribution loss and damage also affects people unequally at the local and micro level, it affects women and children, people living with disabilities and elder people, as well as those who are in the LGBTQI plus community, people who've been displaced already by disasters, whether it be conflict or natural hazards and poverty and lack of access to education services healthcare etc also plays a very important role in structuring vulnerability to loss and damage. So climate change is increasing in intensity and as global heating increases and that's increasing the frequency and intensity of climate related hazards and the impacts that they have and what we're seeing here is some of the projections for what the impacts of climate related hazards will have on people and the kinds of losses and damages that we will see so quite dramatic increases in the impact on populations in developing countries around the world and one outcome of that is that we are inevitably going to see an increase in the population that's in need of humanitarian assistance this is a projection from the IFRC on what this might look like under pessimistic scenarios so scenarios where mitigation and adaptation are not to the extent that we want to see them. Equally loss and damage will have an economic impact on the development potential of countries across the world, and this is an estimate of the impact of climate change on average real GDP across different continents by 2050 and we can see again this unequal distribution of the economic impacts which will have potentially dramatic repercussions for the development trajectories of some of the most the most vulnerable low income countries, particularly you see in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as well as the Asia Pacific, but we must not forget the importance despite those in those really important figures of non economic loss and damage. Those economic impacts will inevitably contribute to other forms of indirect and non economic loss and damage, as well as the direct forms. These are various from, from health and well being to loss of indigenous and local knowledge and cultural sites and sacred places that might happen as a result of sea level rise for instance. Now, bearing on all of that we, we find in the global community, a wide range of different perspectives on how loss and damage is understood and this is a map of that different range of perspectives that's been developed by Emily Boyd and the number of colleagues that just shows that the different perspectives taken by different players. But overall, and this is reflected in UNFCC documents there are three approaches that have been identified for for trying to tackle loss and damage. The first is to avert it. So avoid loss and damage by mitigation efforts to reduce global warming. So keeping keeping the world at 1.5 degrees ideally minimizing loss and damage that might be caused by climate change in the future through adaptation and disaster risk reduction, or addressing loss and damage so when losses and damages happen, or we know that they're going to be unavoidable to address those through a variety of means such as humanitarian action recovery rehabilitation or resettlement. So buying all of this is another perspective which is that loss and damage particularly in the least developed countries in the small island states is actually a matter of compensation and reparations from the developed world but that is a contentious issue that is constantly under discussion within negotiations. So the issue that needs to be raised in relation to that question about how we address loss and damage whether we do it through mitigation and adaptation, or other means is the limits to adaptation. This is an incredibly important guiding principle that we need to bear in mind when thinking about how to address loss and damage. What it effectively means is that no matter what we do now due to locked in global warming and the limitations of what is actually being done globally to mitigate or adapt or reduce risk. It's inevitable that those efforts will fail for some people in some places. And as a result that will result in loss and damage. We must have a very strong set of resources and approaches to address loss and damage because there's no way that mitigation adaptation and other methods will be able to deal with the challenge. These limits to adaptation are hard or soft hard means that there are clear physical constraints to adaptation, which mean that certain types of loss and damage are unavoidable. That means that through social economic and political action, we can we have the potential to avoid things but that requires the right kinds of technology action and political will to do so so we need to make the right decisions. That means that there are many forms of loss and damage that are in theory avoidable, but are very likely to actually be unavoidable. That's another representation of what the net benefits of adaptation are but emphasizing the fact that there will always be a residual climate change risk, no matter what we do to mitigate or adapt. Just coming finally to the question of finance. The estimated impact of loss and damage globally is vast. This is a couple of estimations of what financial damages caused by loss and damage will be over the next 30 years or so and as you can see, we're heading possibly towards the trillions of dollars, and this doesn't include non economic ones and loss and damage that we could quantify and which would drive that even higher. But we have huge gaps in our ability financially to tackle the challenge of loss and damage. This shows a projection on the left of humanitarian costs of climate disasters, and the current funding gap that we see in humanitarian finance so humanitarian finance isn't going to address this problem. Similarly, our adaptation needs just by 2030 are extremely high, but even if these are representations of bilateral and then multi lateral adaptation finance over the past several years, and we're falling short of what is needed to address that so between the mitigation gap and the adaptation gap and the humanitarian gap we really see this gap that is loss and damage and the question is, how can we address that.